About Me
I work as an architect and engineer with most of my experience focussed on distributed data technologies. I manage teams and work with larger organisational issues too.
I’m currently at Confluent leading the Office of the CTO (a research function) although my role has spanned most departments at one point or other over a range of projects from developing a strategy for streaming system design through to engineering a new version of Kafka’s replication protocol.
Previously I led the central data platform team at RBS where we built the event-driven database: ODC. I also worked at Thoughtworks and a few financial institutions. I live in London.
Conferences & Lecture
- Thingmonk
- GOTO 2017 (video)
- DEVOXX 2017 (video)
- QCon 2011, 2012, 2016, 2017
- Codemesh 2015, 2016
- Øredev 2015
- JAX 2011, 2013, 2015, 2016 (more)
- JAX Finance 2015
- Progscon 2015 (more)
- BigDataCon 2013
- Banking Technology Forum (presenter)
- Waters Technology European Trading Architecture Summit 2012 (panelist & presenter)
- Ovum Big Data and Analytics 2012 (panelist)
- JavaOne 2011 (more)
- Oracle OpenWorld 2011 (more)
- UCL (Financial Computing) (more)
- University of London at Birkbeck (Advanced Databases) (more)
- University of Brunel (Software Architecture) (more)
- International Conference on Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST) 2011 (more, more)
- European Trading Architecture Summit 2011
- Coherence Special Interest Group 2010 & 2011 (more)
- Reftest 2010 (more)
- International Workshop on Process Simulation, ICSE 2006
Academic Publications
- Test Oriented Languages: Is it Time for a New Era? RefTest at IEEE International Conference on Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST), 25th March 2011, Berlin, Germany (here)
- Enabling Testing, Design and Refactoring Practices in Remote Locations. RefTest at IEEE International Conference on Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST), 25th March 2011, Berlin, Germany (here)
- Simulating Software Evolution with Varying Numbers of Developers and Validation Using OSS, Australian Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC) 2009 (here)
- Chapter in the book “Software Process Change” part of the Lecture Notes on Computer Science series (here)
- ACM Transactions on Modelling and Computer Simulation (here)
- Paper at the International Workshop on Process Simulation’ at ICSE 2006 in Shanghai (here)
Other stuff
I was honoured to do a best man’s speech for my great friend Piers who, magnificently, returned the favour at my own wedding.
Contact: benstopford(atsymbol)gmail.com